Aerobic and anoxic biodegradation of benzoate: stability of biodegradative capability under endogenous conditions

Aromatic organic compounds are degraded by different enzyme systems under aerobic and anoxic conditions. This raises the question of how bacteria in biological nitrogen removal processes, which cycle bacteria between aerobic and anoxic environments, regulate their enzyme systems for degrading aromatic compounds. As a first step in answering that question, mixed microbial communities were grown on benzoate as sole carbon source in chemostats under fully aerobic and fully anoxic (nitrate as the electron acceptor) conditions and tested for their ability to degrade benzoate in batch reactors after exposure to aerobic or anoxic conditions in the absence of substrate. Aerobically grown biomass retained its ability to degrade benzoate without loss of activity after endogenous exposure to aerobic conditions for up to 8 h. However, when exposed to anoxic conditions, the biomass rapidly lost its aerobic benzoate degrading activity, retaining less than 20% of the initial activity after 8 h. Similarly, anoxically grown biomass retained its ability to degrade benzoate without loss of activity after endogenous exposure to anoxic conditions for up to 8 h. However, when anoxically grown biomass was exposed to aerobic conditions, only 20% of its initial activity was lost in the first 2 h, after which the remaining activity was retained for up to 8 h. Similar experiments with pyruvate showed that the 20% loss of activity was not due to loss of denitrifying enzymes, suggesting that it was due to loss of catabolic enzymes.